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Tuesday, 12 February 2013

Titan Comics to publish Spurrier and Holden's 'Numbercruncher' in colour

Titan Comics has announced it will publish Numbercrucher in July a creator-owned series by writer Si Spurrier and artist PJ Holden, first seen in Judge Dredd Megazine – but now being re-published in full colour.

To be launched on 10th July, Numbercruncher is an off-the-wall romance mixing time-travel, life-after-death and coal-black comedy.

Si Spurrier is a novelist, comic book writer and former BBC art director whose career has often intertwined with flagship British sci-fi comic 2000AD and its spin-off, Judge Dredd Megazine, whether penning the tales of its flagship character, or co-creating such unique and disturbed characters as Lobster Random and The Simping Detective.

Currently writing the electric super-psychological adventure X-Men: Legacy for Marvel NOW!, Spurrier has also penned adventures of Wolverine, Ghost Rider and Punisher.

Spurrier is the writer of two critically-acclaimed post-pulp occult crime novels, Contract and A Serpent Uncoiled, both from Hodder Headline.

Co-creator and artist PJ Holden, also an acclaimed regular on 2000AD and Judge Dredd Megazine, crafting stories of Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper, Johnny Woo and The 86ers. He also co-created Black Ops Extreme for STRIP Magazine.

Holden broke into US comics with Fearless, from Image Comics, and is working on another creator-owned project with Gordon Rennie, Department of Monsterology, which is being published by Renegade Entertainment.

A digital comics pioneer, he designed the 'Comics Reader App' in 2009, which was licensed by NBC for its similarly pioneering Heroes webcomics.

Utterly unusual, vaguely insane, and unexpectedly heart-warming, Numbercruncher follows a brilliant Mathematician who dies young, enters the afterlife and discovers a way to cheat the terrifying Divine Calculator. He schemes to be endlessly reincarnated within the lifespan of the woman he loves, no matter how often the violent bailiffs of the Karmic Accountancy cut short each life.

It falls to one such bailiff – the surly Bastard Zane – to put a stop to the time-twisting romance once and for all, before the Mathematician can pull-off his greatest trick and escape Existential Justice forever!

“When Si first proposed Numbercruncher to me, it was clear we'd need to play with some different techniques for this multi-layered, multi-reality story,” says P.J. Holden, co-creator. "Flipping between the afterlife and the real world was a key element, and we needed something to make those realities distinct. And, being a huge fan of the Pressburger and Powell film A Matter of Life and Death (a romance about a dying World War II pilot, which similarly flits between a monochromatic afterlife and a technicolour real world), it seemed fairly obvious that the best way to do that was to have the afterlife be a sort of dreamy, textured black and white world, and the real world a much more comic book style, pure lineart with colour.

"And, when Zane moves from the afterlife to the real world, crashing that black and white world into the colour, visually it would be show-stopping, and look like nothing else out there."

”PJ and I worked our socks off on Numbercruncher – a time-travelling romantic comedy thriller with more twists than Agatha Christie’s corkscrew," says Si Spurrier, co-creator, "So it’s enormously satisfying to see it published by such a prestigious institution as Titan, and hugely exciting that it’s part of their new all-original-content initiative".

”Numbercruncher is one of those intensely personal yet universally brilliant projects you just can’t wait to get into print”, says Steve White, Senior Comics Editor. “Si is a master of the wonderfully off beat idea, and PJ has illustrated it to perfection. The new, subtle, and emotive colors by colorist, Jordie Bellaire help round off the Titan package. This is a title that’s flown under the radars of a lot of readers in the US, so it’ll be great to finally get it into their hands.”

Numbercruncher was originally serialized in black and white in Judge Dredd Megazine in the UK. The series is now being newly coloured and expanded for the first time by Titan Comics.

• Numbercruncher #1 will hit comic stores on 10th July 2013. The series will also be available to read day and date on the iPad, iPhone, Web, Android and Kindle Fire, exclusively through the comiXology app and comiXology.com. Retailers can order Numbercruncher #1 from the March 2013 edition of Diamond PREVIEWS.

The site downthetubes.net, which began publishing in 1999, is edited by John Freeman whose credits include editor of Doctor Who Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, Star Wars Magazine, and Marvel UK titles such as Overkill, Death's Head II, Warheads and others. He's currently editor of the upcoming Strip Magazine for Print Media Productions.

About the Writers:

• Matthew Badham has written features for Judge Dredd: The Megazine, the Forbidden Planet International blog and more

• Jeremy Briggs contributes news, reviews, interviews and historical articles on British comics. He is a guest writer on Steve Holland's UK comics history blog, Bear Alley, and has written for Comics International, TV Zone, Spaceship Away and Omnivistascope.

• David Hailwood has written comic strips for various publications, including TOXIC, Accent UK, Bulletproof and Futurequake. He also writes comedy material for TV, and regularly contributes to the Temple APA (a showcase for UK comic writers and artists).

• Andy Luke is a writer who draws: he's s created the eponymous Andy Luke's Comic Book, Gran, Absence: a comic about epilepsy, Hold the Phones, It's Alex Jones, and graphic novel, The Watch Thief. He's written about comics too, mainly for Bugpowder.com, and has been involved with the Caption comics festival in Oxford. He currently lives in Belfast with a large box of pasta and a 7ft tall cigarette, and can be found online at http://andy-luke.com and http://awriterwhodraws.com

• Ian Wheeler is a freelance writer who also edited the highly-acclaimed British comics fanzine Eagle Flies Again.